One of the most common questions startup founders ask is also one of the easiest to answer.

If I had to list the 10 most common questions startup founders ask me, here’s one that’s surely near the top:

“How much traction does my startup need in order to fundraise?”

It’s a question that, as someone who’s been teaching entrepreneurship classes for nearly a decade, immediately reminds me of a question my Duke students ask whenever I assign them any sort of essay homework. Their first question is always:

“How many pages does it need to have?”

The two questions — “How much traction does my startup need in order to fundraise?” and “How many pages does my essay need to have?” — are flawed in the same way. That flaw is a huge part of what makes the processes of both writing essays and fundraising so difficult and annoying.

The relationship between essays and fundraising

Whenever I assign my students an essay and they ask how many pages it needs, I give an answer I know they’re going to hate. I tell them:

“Your essays should be as long as they need to be to convey the information you want to convey, and not a word longer or shorter.”

The reason I give that answer is because I need my students to understand the purpose of writing. The purpose isn’t to type an arbitrary number of pages as determined by their professors. The purpose of writing is to convey whatever information they want to convey. If conveying that information takes them two pages… fine. If it takes them 200 pages, that’s fine, too. What I don’t want them to do is write more pages or less pages just to fit within a randomly assigned page count. It’d be like me turning this article into a book just for the sake of writing a book. Yes, I’m perfectly capable of generating 350 pages about this same topic, but, do I need to?

Nope!

Instead, my goal for writing this article is to answer the question: “How much traction does a startup need in order to fundraise?”, and I can answer that question in four short words:

It’s the wrong question!

The reason it’s the wrong question is the same reason my students asking for page counts is also the wrong question. Asking how much traction a startup needs in order to fundraise misunderstands the fundamental purpose of fundraising.

What’s the purpose of fundraising?

Despite how lots of entrepreneurs seem to approach it, fundraising isn’t a necessity for every entrepreneurial venture. Instead, fundraising is a tool entrepreneurs can deploy when they believe doing so is going to help them achieve the desired outcome of their entrepreneurial ventures. As a result, the purpose of fundraising is:

To help entrepreneurs achieve their entrepreneurial goals.

Yes, I realize that’s a vague way of describing the purpose of fundraising, but it’s also the only accurate description. After all, every entrepreneur’s goal is different, which means the reason to fundraise is always different.

For example, imagine two entrepreneurs: One entrepreneur’s goal for launching an entrepreneurial venture is to fight global warming and the other entrepreneur’s goal is to get rich by exiting from a company for a billion dollars. Putting aside which of those goals might be “right” or “wrong”, “better” or “worse”, “moral” or “immoral”, etcetera, they’re two very different goals, and their differences necessarily impact the way entrepreneur would approach the issue of fundraising in relation to traction. However, in both cases, the most important question isn’t a question about traction; it’s about entrepreneurial strategy.

The relationship between traction and fundraising

Ultimately, fundraising is a strategy for executing entrepreneurial ventures. Once entrepreneurs decide fundraising is the right strategy for them, that’s when traction becomes an issue. Specifically, the amount of traction a startup has is what helps convince potential investors a startup is worth investing in. But that’s it… that’s what traction is for. It’s not a requirement for fundraising. It’s a piece of data inside a broader narrative designed to compel investors.

I’m pointing this out because other data is going to compel investors, too. For example, the quality of a team is going to impact an investor’s decision. So is the dynamics of a market. Heck… if an investor is best friends with the parents of the entrepreneur asking for funding, that’s going to impact the investor’s decision, too.

In other words, traction is just one data point in the fundraising process. To be clear, it can be a very compelling datapoint, but nobody can tell entrepreneurs how much traction they need in order to fundraise because every situation is different. That’s what makes it the wrong question to ask. Entrepreneurs asking for someone to tell them how much traction they need in order to fundraise are almost certainly entrepreneurs fundraising for the wrong purpose. They’re fundraising for the sake of fundraising rather than fundraising because they’ve made enough progress with their startups to convince themselves that raising capital is the best way to achieve their entrepreneurial goals, and that’s not a good reason to fundraise.

Good entrepreneurs don’t worry about how much traction they need to convince investors to invest. Good entrepreneurs worry about how much traction they need to convince themselves that they actually need to raise capital.